


Watchful

by rivendellrose



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen, Halloween, Kissing, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-13 19:00:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9137254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivendellrose/pseuds/rivendellrose
Summary: For LJ user ruuger, who requested "Spike & Giles (or, you know... Spike/Giles... :P) with Halloween-loving Giles and disapproving Spike :)"Originally posted on LJ in November of 2009.This is mostly just silliness, but there's a lot of chemistry between them, and one could easily read as it going further after the 'camera' looks away. I certainly meant it that way.





	

“You are _not_ really going to put that on.”

Giles looked over his shoulder at the disapproving vampire who slouched on his sofa, then down at the woven poncho and sombrero he’d just pulled out of the closet. “Of course I am. It’s Halloween.”

Spike snorted. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. That piece of tarted up consumerism? It’s not for us.”

“Who, exactly, do you mean by ‘us?’ I wasn’t aware we had any common society to speak of.”

“You mean apart from being two lone Englishmen here in California, two full adults in a horde barely out of their teens, comrades-in-arms, and, oh yeah, let’s not forget - two men of the night.”

“Men of the night?” It was Giles’ turn to snort, now. “A phrase far more suited to dubiously-written adult movies than to my own life, thank you. And as for you, unless your chip has stopped working, I can hardly see how it--”

“Chip or not, I’m still a _vampire_.”

“Hmph.”

“And _you_ are still an old sorcerer, no matter how much you pretend you really are that stuffy librarian exterior you wear for the little kiddies,” Spike continued, ignoring Giles’ noise of protest and leaning forward. 

His whole body language attuned to Giles as he leaned his bare elbows on black-denim-clad knees. While his posture typically was a studied display that he couldn’t care less about what was going on around him, Spike had a way of dropping that facade in an instant in favor of an attentiveness that could make one feel like the only man in the world. His sharp cheekbones cast shadows in the dim light of Giles’ living room, his white hair and inhumanly pale skin shone in the lamp-light, and the dark roots of his hair seemed to draw attention to eyelashes and eyes both shockingly dark for the rest of his coloring. 

Spike’s sudden displays of attentiveness, Giles thought with some embarrassment, seemed to draw out a similar fascination in those around him... whether or not they wanted to reciprocate.

“I know the kind of crowd you went with when you were young, Watcher. I ran with that sort, too. No trouble was too much, no darkness too dark, no perversion too--”

“I beg your pardon,” Giles interrupted in a tone of quiet ice.

“I won’t tell them.” Spike waved his hand dismissively toward the door - neither of them needed to speak for it to be clear he meant Buffy and the other children. Children. Giles sighed - even his own thoughts betrayed that of course Spike was right. As much as he hated to admit it, he could never truly think of Buffy and her cohorts as anything but children to be protected and cared for, whereas Spike, despite his appearance, was... something else. An equal?

“We’ve both seen what’s in the shadows, Watcher,” Spike told him, a cheeky grin touching his lips as if he knew exactly what Giles was thinking. “What did you do on All Hallow’s in the old days, hmm? I bet it wasn’t dressing up in a stupid sombrero and passing out candy.”

“No.” 

“Summon a few demons, eh, Rupes?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Why not? Too informal? Not stodgy enough for you? Does it remind you too much of the old days?”

“Not hardly. It sounds idiotic.”

To Giles’ surprise, Spike laughed softly. “Fine, then. What should I call you?”

“I think ‘Watcher’ will do just fine, if you can’t stay with ‘Giles,’ like everyone else.”

“I’m not a surname kind of bloke.” Spike stood up and stretched - languid, like a cat. His bones were far too long, and the little bit of taut white stomach that showed when his t-shirt rode up... Giles turned away and took off his glasses, wiping them with a handkerchief. 

“Rupert.”

It’s been too long since someone’s called him that. The name is tied up with memories like spider’s webs around a fly - Olivia, Jenny, Wesley, his father... a world of disappointments of every shape and form. “Certainly not that, either.”

A glance over his glasses shows Spike grinning cheekily, his dark eyes shining. “ _Watcher._ ” 

Spike had called him by that title a thousand times. Never like this. It sounds soft in his mouth, now, as though he pronounced it with the greatest care, a little bit like a question, a little bit like an order. Giles could never have admitted it to another living being, but something in him responds to that tone. It calls to the part of him he hasn’t let out in years, and it’s been too long since he’s let that part of him out to play for a little bit.

Spike stalks forward - the only word for it, with the way the vampire slides his hips, tilts his head, arches his shoulders. He’s shorter than Giles, but he exudes something else, something not so much inhuman as _completely_ human, and yet utterly, unquestionably of the night, and the part of Giles that long ago left Oxford for a life slumming in London with a wild crowd of magicians and vagabonds has missed that visceral liveliness more than he could ever have admitted to anyone else. 

With the careful lead-up the vampire had created - giving him a chance to back off, perhaps? Could Spike really be so considerate? - it could hardly have been a surprise when one long, black-varnished hand reached up and tugged Giles’ jaw down toward him, pulling him into a fierce kiss. 

“What’d your old friends in the bad crowd call you, Watcher?” Spike murmured against his throat. The breath of his words was weirdly cool. 

“Ripper.”

Spike laughed softly, but it was an oddly friendly laugh. The laugh of comrades, of equals. Of two men who understood the world, and all that was in it, of darkness and of light. 

“Ripper it is, then.”


End file.
